Making, Managing and Mobilising Emotion: The Language of Feeling In Turbulent Times

We live in turbulent times – of overlapping crises, polarisation, resurgent authoritarianism and strategic disinformation. Such times are not only interpreted through language but also felt through language. Fear, anger, hope, resentment, compassion and despair do not simply exist within individuals, awaiting expression; rather, emotions are invoked, negotiated and made consequential in discourse and interaction – central to how crises are understood and political projects legitimised.

This session treats emotions as social and discursive phenomena – constituted, attributed, contested and regulated through talk, text and interaction. Through language, emotions become resources for persuasion, governance and resistance.

We invite empirical contributions examining how emotion is managed through language in everyday, professional, institutional and public settings – how it is displayed, oriented to, ascribed, avowed or contained as people encounter institutions under strain. This may include how professionals, citizens and marginalised groups negotiate emotional norms, or how emotion is mobilised in public or political life: deployed to legitimise policy, authority and exclusion, yet reclaimed to sustain critique, solidarity and resistance. In an era of disinformation, emotional appeals are also susceptible to distortion and delegitimisation, dismissed as irrational, manipulated or staged – discrediting a feeling may be a way of disarming its political force.

A plurality of approaches is welcome – from conversation analysis, discursive psychology and emotionography to narrative, rhetorical and critical discourse analysis, and beyond. The session is especially relevant to social work, criminology, political sociology, media and movement research, but speaks across all of sociology.